Go Gently
by tessiete
Summary: Mulder once told Scully that the truth he's been looking for, the truth is in her. And that's where she knows she must pursue it. Even if the price of it is her own life.
1. The Last Good Men

_"Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright_  
 _Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,_  
 _Rage, rage against the dying of the light."_

 _\- Dylan Thomas_

* * *

It comes to her when she doesn't want it to. It's cold, and wet. Heavy, like long hair coming out of the sea, like hers, tugging on her spine, and drawing lines in rivulets down her back. It comes to her bathed in guilt.

Guilt.

What doesn't live in guilt these days, she wonders. It's so familiar that she almost misses it, and of course, when she does catch it, the slither of feeling spreads from the palm of her hand, spidering out to her fingertips, and through her veins, much like the lifeblood she'd rather forget flowed through her.

Blood infiltrated by foreign markers. Alien genes.

Junk DNA, Mulder had called it once.

"When we found you," he'd said, speaking around the truth, "When you were sick, the first time, the guys analysed your blood."

"I didn't know Frohike was a medical doctor," she said, twisting her head sharply to dislodge the soft concern in Mulder's voice. "What'd he get his license revoked for? Unethical treatment of the human body?"

Mulder smiled, but his eyes still held hers.

"No," he acknowledged. "That was for something else. They did this at my request. And they found something."

"What something?" It bothered her, viscerally, that she was more unknown to herself than anyone else.

"Byers called it 'junk DNA'. Foreign genes that co-mingled with your own genetic makeup, but were alien in origin."

"Aliens from space? Or -"

"It doesn't matter. It just cluttered up your system. It was killing you."

"But I didn't die," she protested, reminding herself. She didn't die. She never died. "I came back, I chose to come back, and no one ever mentioned this to me then. I've had blood tests since, and nothing's ever shown up."

"You didn't know to look for it."

"You can't just, just -" she struggled, grasping for an easy way to explain the impossibility of the science to someone aiming to defy it. "That's not how it works. You can't just add genes to pre-existing DNA, and then hide them. The technology doesn't exist, and even if it did, genes don't disappear. They can be inactive -"

"I think that's what the chip is for," he insisted. "The chip keeps the junk DNA quiet. It makes it harmless. Until it's removed, at which point, the non-compatible components run rampant, and replicate. It's -"

"Cancer."

"You know this. It's happened before. To you."

She shook her head, denying it.

"That's not what happened," she argued. "My remission occurred after courses, and courses of chemotherapy. I had help. I had belief – your belief. I prayed -"

"God helps he who helps himself, Scully," he said. "You prayed, but you also put that chip back in your neck."

"There's no definitive proof that it made any difference," she said. Her voice had been worn, but weighted, then. It wasn't coloured with the static crackle of distance that blurred her speech when she talked these days.

"You're standing here, fighting me," he'd countered. "That's proof enough for me."

So he'd told her. And she'd forgotten.

Even after Antarctica, even after the blinding snow, and the cold, and what she'd seen, she'd forgotten about this.

It might have been wilful ignorance, she concedes to herself, staring at the most recent run of tests in her hand. The gossamer sheets of plastic marked in the ghosts of her own genetics shimmer back at her, as transparent as her own false justifications.

But, she reasons, there'd been no cause to consider it after that. Her regular screenings came back negative, year after year. Five years. Then ten. And in between, there'd been Mulder to deal with. Mulder's own fragile, complicated wellness.

And William.

God, she thinks about William. All the time.

What if he's unhappy? What if he's scared? What if he misses her?

What if he doesn't.

And yet, all this time, even with the countdown on, and passed, and time overrun, even then – she'd ignored this.

Because if her DNA has been manipulated, if she's been made immune, then she knows she could have stopped this years ago. Before they knew the date, before they lost their jobs, and their home, and their child. Before it had gotten this far.

"The truth that I've been searching for," he'd said, "That truth is in you."

Mulder had known. And he was right.

So it's guilt, now, that reminds her of what she'd forgotten – what she'd chosen to suppress, and ignore. Forget. To say that, even to herself, denies her her own culpability. She is guilty of so much, and it seems only fitting that the end of everything should rest at her feet, too.

When people first started falling sick, she'd turned off the news, and gone to bed alone. She'd been going to bed alone for a few months, but that night the sheets felt especially coarse, the comforter especially heavy, and she lay in bed, suffocating, until the lack of oxygen took her.

Two months later, the sickness had spread. Cases were being reported in Europe, and China. Canada's CDC centres were being accused of secretly implementing containment strategies at hospitals across the country, at the same time the U.S. was vehemently denying the presence of any afflicted individuals on their soil. This was despite the quarantine being enforced at a small hospital in Dallas.

"It's targeting the young, and strong, Scully," Mulder said, his voice made shallow by the thin phone she held. "And there will be a loud wailing in Egypt. It's beginning."

"This isn't a plague, Mulder," she countered impatiently. "It's an epidemic."

"What's the difference?"

"Well, significantly less paranoia, and fear-mongering, for one thing."

He'd hung up the phone without any mention of her absence, and the next morning she'd found a link to Tad O'Malley's show in her inbox. She hadn't felt compelled to watch it, and he hadn't sent another.

When next he called, he'd had Sveta.

That seemed long ago, now, though thinking about it, laying it all out in her head as she tries to pinpoint the moment of her own failure, she realises it has only been a few months. Five, at most.

Five months she could have spent doing something. Wasn't that what she wanted? Wasn't that what she missed?

She'd joined the Bureau believing it would give her the chance to have an impact. To make a difference. There was some naïve, girlish part of her that still ached for the opportunity, and on the X-Files, in pursuit of Mulder's glorious truth, she'd thought she might find it. She thought she had found it; something bigger than her, but still tangible. Important, but dependent on the devotion of someone else to be affective.

It wasn't arrogance, so much as it was her own existential fear of her own absence. The end, her end, had always been coming, and time needed to be marked. Noted. She needed to touch something outside herself, and change it for the better, if she could.

But with the end so explicitly set, and their main seat of power usurped by higher authorities, life on the run had worn her out. She was exhausted. The vibrant red of hope she'd be so saturated with once had been washed out by that cool, steady drip of guilt. Her hair grew long, and colourless, her skin pale, and her voice brittle. When she stood beside Mulder now, with empty hands, she felt like a dirge to American Gothic. Not the fugitive truth-seekers they'd set out as. Not the Moses of the world, dragging light and guidance from down the mountain.

It was a quiet, slow slipping away.

Her sights were more intimate now. She thinks about her work at the hospital, surrounded by prayers, and scalpels. She assisted, she corrected, she let herself melt into the background, secondary – tertiary – to the drama that played out. One person, she prayed, one child at a time.

A tangible result, and a life saved.

Then this.

Sveta had been insistent, and Scully needed a control. Something to compare Sveta's DNA to, something Mulder would accept (and something, she heard whispered in the back of her mind, to prove what Mulder had told her years ago).

She'd done the sequencing. She'd known where to look, where she hadn't wanted to before, and there it was.

One lonely marker. Quiet. Inactive. Just a little piece of trash suspended harmlessly in her system.

But Sveta didn't have it – not the same way.

And that, more than anything, that made her angry. It had been so many months since she'd felt something other than sadness, or disappointment, or the cold, blue stab of injustice with no recourse. This anger – it warmed her. The icy pane she'd set to shut Mulder out was opened, and though it was too early for spring, the bracing chill of fear invigorated her, making her feel feverish. There was power in pursuit, there was opportunity in action, and Mulder still believed. He was still here.

And William was out there.

That was the hardest thing to come home to. Looking at Mulder, she could only see everything he'd had taken from him, the last, and most treasured being the son she'd stolen. He never said anything, never mentioned their child, never spoke William's name – even in reference to his father, or her brother. It was hard, to hear nothing from him, when William's name reverberated through her skull, an echo that never faded. And it made her wonder if he saw anything at all when he looked at her.

She'd wondered that for a long time.

"Scully, you were never just anything to me."

This, she wanted to believe.

And so she'd looked harder at what he'd given her. She's still looking.

Months passed, and her mother had died. Everything became so immediate, and work – work beckoned. Find this, fix this, fight this.

Secretly, she'd continued to plot out her own genome, picking out genes, highlighting any mutations, and pinpointing the sequence of junk that languished inside of her. She'd tried to isolate those genes, and replicate them inside sturdier molecular casings, but they were always the first to die outside her body.

For hours at a time, she came back to this small metal stool, adjusting the focus on the microscope, staring at these withered foreign bodies, dead and decaying before they could be of use to anyone but the men who first created them.

Which left her with a problem. The solution she had nestled in the folds of her brain, not yet spoken, but fully formed, and cradled within. A vaccine.

Synthesised from her own blood, the immunity she carried being replicated and repeated over, and over again until the cure was as widespread, and common as a smallpox vaccination, and the Spartan horse it smuggled into the immune systems of everyone it vowed to protect.

Of course, that would take some time.

And a lot of blood. A lot of flexible cellular matter that wouldn't collapse the minute it was evacuated from her bloodstream

She needed stem cells. William's cells. William would have the same marker. William, she hoped, William would be protected. If there was nothing to be done, then at least William would be saved. He had to be. There had to be some reason she had been his mother, something she could – must have – given to him.

But he wasn't hers to take from, or ask anything of, and for the world, for the world, she couldn't. Even if she knew where to find him.

Which left her with a problem. One that she considers now, as she gazes at the film in front of her. There's something, something she's missing.

Her hand rubs idly at the back of her neck, sweeping against the soft baby hairs at her nape, the longer strands pulled up into a pony higher than she's worn for almost ten years. Her nails scratch against the skin there, catching on the tiny scar, and she knows what she has to do.

Henrietta Lacks, the immortal woman, who died more than half a century ago, but whose cells continued to be grown and studied, used as a testing ground for theranostics, virology, and cloning, these cells were sturdy. Invasively prolific. And, she knew from earlier experimentation, entirely unable to sustain any alien gene of hers she attempted to graft into them.

Cancer cells that could sustain, and replicate the immunity to the Spartan virus.

She knows where to find those. But first, she has to tell Mulder.


	2. My Fountain of Delight

_"From such a gentle thing, from such a fountain of all delight, my every pain is born."_  
 _\- Michelangelo_

* * *

He arrives at the hospital with his familiar prowling gait, and innate humility worn heavily on his shoulders. She hasn't told him anything yet. Her phone call had been succinct, only asking him to come to her, but she thinks he must suspect something nonetheless. He's biting his lip, and staring intently at the light-board instead of her face. He hasn't brought flowers this time.

"What are we looking at, here?"

His hands are tucked into the deep pockets of the khaki green jacket he calls his 'apocalypse coat'.

"Haven't you noticed, Scully?" He'd asked, pulling it off the rack at one of the Goodwill's they'd stopped at their first weeks out. Adrenaline, and relief, threaded with a certain hope had been pounding through their veins, and their feet, back then. "Everyone on TV wears these coats at the end of the world."

"Really?" Her finger sought out a hole in the lining as her voice probed for one in his reasoning.

"Natural disasters, man-made catastrophes, alien invasions," he confirmed. "Zombies."

"The undead?"

"Technically, that term was originally used solely to refer to vampires, popularised by -"

"Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897, in which a vampire is a creature neither living, nor dead, having been transformed into a being altogether different by an infectious curse. I read."

"He's also immortal," Mulder said, snatching at the the last word of expertise flitting around.

"Zombies," he clarified, "Are the reanimated dead. The dead made live, though not living."

"Those are some pretty fine lines of technicality you're walking there, Mulder." She buried a smile in her voice.

"I like to be precise," he said.

He shook his arms to dislodge them from the sleeves, pulling the coat off. It had fit perfectly, but there wasn't much cause for a coat in New Mexico. Mulder hung it clumsily on the hanger, the plastic warped from reuse, and slipped it back between a windbreaker, and a long out of fashion ski jacket.

Her hand stretched out, pinching the fabric at the cuff of one sleeve, and extending the arm for her examination.

"Well," she said. "If the date is set, we can't reasonably face the end of the world with you in an orange jumpsuit. We want to be taken seriously by our overlords."

She grabbed the jacket, taking it up in her arms. It was heavier than she'd expected, its cotton thickness protection from every element, absorbent to rain, wind, and sun in equal measure.

Five dollars later, and Mulder had an all-weather coat, suitable for every occasion, and absolutely necessary for the end of the world.

So of course, he was wearing it now.

"You know what we're looking at, Mulder," she says. "This isn't a test."

"Alright," he concedes. She can see that he's tense. "Why are we looking at it?"

"Because I think it might be the answer to everything we've been searching for."

He looks at her then. At first, his irises shift to the corners of his eyes for a glance, but then her blue gravity pulls him round to face her. Air whistles through his teeth in a skeptical burst.

"Well," he says. "I can't fault your flair for melodrama, though usually that's my sort of line."

She smiles, breaking for him to cushion the blow she knows will be dealt more than once this round. She needs Mulder to stay on his feet.

"If it's any consolation, you beat me to it years ago."

"What do you mean?"

"Four months ago, you asked me to listen to the story of a young girl's abduction, and when I didn't want to believe her, you asked me for proof. I didn't find it. Not in her."

"Right," he says. "Sveta didn't have alien DNA. You did."

"It's not that simple."

"What does that mean?"

"I mean that the genetic material I extracted from Sveta didn't have any unusual markers in it. It didn't contain anything I didn't recognise from hundreds of other, random blood samples."

"So?"

"That doesn't mean the foreign DNA didn't exist. It just existed in everybody."

"So what you're saying, Scully," he begins, testing to see if the ice of her composure will take his weight. "Is that there's a little alien in all of us."

"Essentially. Yes. Possibly."

"There was a yes in that concession, and I'm going to remember that," he's grinning, and Scully is sure he'd be crowing if there wasn't a sliver of doubt his paranoia keeps twisting into his side. He sees her face mimic his own in a way devoid of both enthusiasm and her usual, grounding pragmatism. "How did it get there?"

"My best guess is that it was piggybacked. Hidden in the same inoculation used to tag, and categorise nearly every living person in the West after 1967, and passed down genetically to their children."

"The smallpox vaccination."

"Right," she says. "The inactive form of what is now being termed the 'Spartan' virus, smuggled into the bloodstream on the back of a vaccine."

"I guess they learned from Troy, after all," Mulder suggests, though his tone is not as light as his words, and he's gazing at her illuminated film on the board again. "Jesus. We're all just walking time bombs, waiting for someone to press the trigger."

"That's what I fear, too."

Mulder nods slowly. He bites his cheek. He swallows, digesting the quietus of humanity she brings.

"Can it be stopped?" he asks. The question comes long after he's thought it, but she knows he's fearful of the answer.

"Yes."

She wants to alleviate that terror. He turns back towards her, searching. Nothing's ever been so easy as her assurance, and if it is...

"I'm sensing a big 'but' coming up, which usually I wouldn't object to, but I've got a feeling I'm not going to like this one."

"But," Scully allowed. "An anomaly did exist in my own genetic profile. Something that could only be – foreign."

"So you're more alien? I don't understand."

"It's complicated," she sighs. "Essentially, I have an extra marker, extra genetic material, as well as the standard deviation created by the Spartan virus. I have an immunity."

"How is that possible?"

Her feet hurt from standing all day, even in sneakers. The scrubs she's wearing are thin, and she wishes she'd had the foresight to wear the crisp cotton, and wool folds of a suit. She's feeling entirely too insubstantial for this conversation.

"When I was returned, the first time, you said you found 'junk DNA'. That's what this is," she says. Her arms are crossed in front of her, and she tilts her head to the side, looking at him obliquely. "It's the virus in its purest, most alien, most humanly incompatible form, and from my contact with it, it's given me immunity to the Spartan iteration."

"It almost killed you," he says.

"But it didn't," she insists. "It wasn't supposed to. Instead, my body fought it through the rapid destruction, and regeneration of new cellular material, which the chip regulated. I think that's what they were hoping for. Its presence gave my body the time it required to fight one virus, and immunize itself to the other. I think the chip is the earliest form of protection against the virus."

"Only a wholly unreliable, delicate, and impractical one," he agrees. "The first problem being, people tend to not trust computer chips being implanted without their consent."

"They tend to take them out." And she's leading him now.

He can feel where she's pulling at him, tugging at him to follow her peacefully, but he won't go.

"Scully," he warns. He leans back away from her, away from the glow of the board, the shadow of her translucent self-portrait brushing across his face as he creates distance. It's as though he hopes distance will allow him to deny her now, when he's never denied her anything, even to the edge of the world.

"Mulder, there's a way to stop this epidemic. A way to prevent it from becoming a plague -"

"I don't want to hear it, Scully," he protests.

"You said it yourself, it's going to wipe out everybody on earth -"

"Not you."

"But -"

"What about our son?"

"William's safe," she breathes, barely a whisper, and even more broken than it has been these few months. "I'd have passed that immunity to him. I have."

"Good. Good," he says, again. "They owe us that, at least. They owe you."

She waits for the relief to settle over him, bringing his shoulders down, and lowering her gaze to the floor.

"Mulder," she tries, more quietly this time. She's only being rational. "There is hope."

"Yeah," he says, taking his time to draw the word from his mouth. "But we both know I have a delicate constitution, and the fact that you didn't lead with this hopeful news makes me think it's a really bad idea."

"There might be a way to engineer a vaccine by synthesising, and replicating my own immunity."

"Like cowpox."

She tips her head once in agreement. "Like cowpox."

"If it's that simple, then why'd you call me down here?"

"The mechanism is simple, but the process isn't. This aberration in my DNA is like nothing I've ever seen before. This alien material, and my own body's immunity is totally unprecedented. However I survived, if it was luck, or science -"

"It was a miracle."

"Whatever you want to call it, my cells hold the blueprint to our survival. But I can't access them. These cells, Mulder, they're so fragile. Every time I extract them, they die within minutes, and they won't be made to replicate. The genetic material we need deteriorates too rapidly."

"Then we all die," he concludes.

"There are cells," she pushes, sliding her revelation down the line of Mulder's epiphany of defeat. "HeLa cells, harvested from a woman before her death in 1951, and used every day in labs around the world. Immortal cells. Cancer cells."

"No."

Her eyes flash between the board, and him, her hands moving as quickly as her words begin to, rushing now towards the end.

"Traditional HeLa cells won't work, in this case. I've tried them -"

"Absolutely not."

"- Stem cells might, but even if, even if – there's no guarantee they'd be any more resilient -"

"I don't want to hear any more of this, Scully, it's insane."

"I'm not crazy. The chip is the only thing regulating the growth of cells we need. I take it out -"

"You take that chip out, and you destroy it."

"We have no other choice."

He bends forward, taking her shoulders, and holding her eyes with his.

"I can't watch you die again, Scully."

She smiles. Her hand rests against his cheek, the smooth warmth of her palm planed across his skin.

"If I'm right about this, Mulder," she says. "I'm going to live forever."


	3. I Am Not Resigned

_"Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you._  
 _Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust._  
 _A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,_  
 _A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost."_

 _\- Edna St. Vincent Millay_

* * *

She calls in Agent Einstein at four in the afternoon. She chooses her partly because she wants to mess with her, but mostly because she's the only one she thinks she can trust with a scalpel.

"I still don't understand what I'm looking for," she says, defiant, and hostile, with the area bathed in iodine, and the blade in her hand

"A small, metal fragment," Scully explains with a patience she's only mustered to keep herself calm. "It'll look like a piece of buckshot."

"Except that it's a highly advanced computer chip from the planet Glorp."

"Such scepticism, Agent Einstein," Scully chides. "And here I was under the impression that your recent work with us had warmed you up to the idea of more extreme possibilities."

The girl's fingers are braced against the base of her skull, her fingers frigid on her skin, even through the thin latex of the gloves.

"Bend your head," she orders.

Scully makes a final sweep over her neck, one hand gathering a few stray strands to the other. She breathes out, like a sniper, and holds still.

Einstein's first incision is swift, but too shallow, and her exhalation comes out like a shot.

"Fuck," she mutters.

Scully's mouth twists, smirking with her chin on her chest.

"Nervous?"

"I don't want to hurt you," Einstein mumbles, already bent back to her task. "There's a lot of scar tissue back here."

"Turns out, there's more than just Mormons living in Utah."

A short burst of air banks against her neck, rustling her hair like reeds on a riverbed, and she thinks that Einstein may have laughed. Scully sighs in acknowledgement, finally letting herself fall into a more relaxed state, trusting Einstein's hands, if not her ability to be justly open-minded. The constant, and barely restrained condemnation of her sanity had been unnerving. Under any other circumstance, she wouldn't mind – she had never minded. But this time, her choice had to be the right choice, and doubt was easily sown.

"I think I've got it," Einstein says. Her fingers crawl along the skin, pulling it away from the cut she's made. She lays the scalpel down on the small tray to her right. The knife misses the square of sterile paper, and clatters over the metal surface, the echo slightly amplified by the silence in the room. Her hand grabs hold of a pair of tweezers she's located without taking her eyes off her discovery.

Scully cannot feel the metal prongs dip into her body, but she can feel the gentle protest of flesh as Einstein liberates the tiny piece of metal from it's embrace.

"There," she says. She swings her arm back, holding the chip aloft, as her left hand lunges over to the tray to snatch up a pad of gauze.

There's not much blood, but she's quick to cover the wound.

"Press hard," she instructs, removing her hand for Scully's to replace.

Her tone borders on imperious, and Scully barely manages to withhold a saucy, "I know."

But she does, and she holds the gauze firmly against the site.

Einstein carefully drops the fragment onto an open slide, making sure to track it from the tweezers to the glass. Her task accomplished, she lays the tweezers by, and takes up a needle, and a length of 3.0 nylon.

"Okay, lift up," she says. "I'm just going to give you a couple quick stitches, and then we can take a look at your bit of space junk, Alf."

Einstein's stitches are as deft as her tongue. A few minutes later, Scully slides her chair sideways, her hands propelling her down the length of the table, granting the young doctor a view through the scope.

Einstein is silent, studying it. Scully waits. Finally, she looks up at her, waiting and wanting Scully's most impossible explanation. She doesn't give her anything, and Einstein is compelled to provide her own.

"Well, it's definitely a computer chip," she concedes. "But that doesn't prove aliens made it."

"You're right," Scully agrees. "Aliens didn't make it. We did."

"For what purpose, Agent Scully?"

"To monitor and regulate the neural and immune systems of specific individuals, in an effort to find a viable resistance to an alien plague."

Einstein pushes away from the table. Her black overcoat is tossed over her arm, and hangs with the same limp surrender it adopted over the back of the chair. She means for her haste to communicate her impatience with this fantasy, but Scully recognises the fear in her step. The same fear she once had.

"Okay," Einstein declares, gathering her things. "I thought Agent Mulder was a nut, but you take his delusions to a whole new level."

"What makes you say that?"

She throws her arms out, making herself big, standing her ground, with one eye on her escape.

"Because you make it sound so reasonable. You start with this rational premise I have to agree with, but then come to this insane conclusion. You make me complicit. At least Mulder is honest."

"I am being honest with you, Agent Einstein," Scully presses. She keeps her seat, keeps the image of cool detachment she needs to convince this woman; tries to think how she would have convinced herself twenty-four years ago. "You agree because the evidence supports the theory."

"No -"

"Roswell, 1947 -"

"You're absolutely crazy, lady."

"A spacecraft crash lands in the middle of the New Mexican desert."

"Where's your proof?"

"That chip, Agent Einstein, is light-years beyond anything being engineered today. Alien technology harvested from the site, and perfected by an international syndicate of men, operating in conjunction with a hostile alien force."

Einstein opens her mouth, denial, rage, and incredulity warring with each other, and at least overcome by curiosity. There was a small part of her that was adding everything up, and coming to the same impossible conclusion. She needed to know.

"Why?" she demands. "To what possible end?"

"Ours," Scully says.

"The end of the world." The proclamation has never been uttered with quite as much disbelief before.

"This epidemic we're seeing," she says. "This virus has been designed to be as devastating as possible to its human host. And it acts fast."

The anger washes out of Einstein's face, leaving only fear.

"How fast?"

"It's already in motion."

"But it's under control," she argues, her tongue hammering out denial into her jaw. "There are quarantines, and travel advisories in place."

"They won't be enough." Scully's denial is soft, languishing in the back of her throat, but certain. "The spread will increase exponentially, gaining momentum without any sign of a cure."

"The patient in Texas," Einstein whispers. Scully doesn't need to confirm any more.

"It's not just a particularly virulent airborne pathogen," she says. "It can be triggered remotely in anyone who received a smallpox vaccination."

Einstein inhales deeply. Her brow furrows, working the problem, filing it safely as a hypothetical to clear the fog of knee-jerk repudiation. She stares at the floor, one hand extended over it, palm down, fingers spread, exerting her will.

"I'm not saying I believe you," she says. "But for the sake of argument, if what you say is true, how are we going to stop it?"


	4. Gentle, and Easily Tamed

_"Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of the world." - Robert Kennedy_

Cancer doesn't play fair. It can lie in wait, patient, pondering its best attack, and mapping out battle plans for a war of attrition. It may be silent, whispering through the blood, and marrow for months without notice. It can be violent, or it can command a calm surrender. It can be gentle. It can take many forms, but it never comes when you call it.

Months pass. The epidemic spreads. Slowly, at first, the panic held at bay by competent medical professionals who have seen it all. Doctors are dispatched to poverty stricken countries, with high population densities. West Africa is the epicentre. Scully imagines it makes it easier to incite global paranoia when there's an obvious Other for people to point to; an obvious source. It also has the distinction of demonstrating the virus' communicability. With more people, and fewer of them primed by the smallpox inoculation, the strange new illness has the chance to prove its innate power. Reports flood in. For every one person infected, the disease spreads to twelve to fifteen more, on par with the measles, but more deadly: a seventy-percent mortality rate becomes an objective, instead of a death knell.

Of those infected with Spartan, everybody dies.

Then, their doctors die.

No progress is made, except by the disease, which reaches its hands out to cover Egypt, and Libya. Mulder talks about darkness, a sooty covering that can be felt in the despair of nations, and the cries of refugees who receive no sanctuary.

Scully tells him to stop being so fatalistic. Stop watching so much TV. Start doing something.

"Once the frogs and locusts hit, you can start calling it a plague. Until then, make yourself useful," she says.

"We can't all die martyr's for the sins of the world, Scully."

Skinner sends all the hard copies of X-Files he can find to the country, when she asks. Mulder needs to work. He needs something to put his back up against, when she's gone.

The virus continues it's course across Asia, dipping its toes into the waters of Europe. Then, there's a report of a whole family falling ill in Flint. Michigan.

It's a thousand miles from Dallas. There's no connection, no context for the disease to be there.

Then another person dies in Allentown, Pennsylvania. And three more in Bellefleur, Oregon.

Scully knows all these places.

Quarantines begin popping up across the country. News pundits, like prophets, claim to know the source of the contagion. The more respectable outlets say it's being transmitted by water drawn from contaminated aquifers, or through lead pipes. Others say it's from imported food, and wines stored in improperly sealed barrels. Trade embargoes are drafted. There are runs on non-perishable goods. The price of bottled water sky-rockets. In the summer, California's drought takes more than a thousand lives, while some houses still keep their grass green.

The networks start talking about chemical leaks, and wind patterns. The more alarmist ones say the same things, but eagerly pronounce the barely concealed xenophobia of their peers.

Immigration is halted.

Deportations increase.

Now, everyone is ignorant. Everyone is afraid.

When the first case reaches Virginia, Scully orders Mulder back to the country. He's resistant, but she won't give in, this time. Even now, they're cutting it too close. Einstein and Miller follow.

Together, they hole up in the rambling, sun bleached house. The brown grass grows tall that year, like the one before, and nothing remarkable happens there.

Then, at the end of August, when hospitals are warning people against gathering in large groups, and every store front is giving away free hand sanitizer, Charlie calls to check in. He's been doing that more, now that her mom is gone. At first, his calls were tentative. He asked about funeral arrangements; if she needed any money for a service; if he needed to come down for the reading of Maggie's will. Then he asked if she was okay. He asked if she needed anything. He asked about work.

This time, when he calls, she doesn't try to explain anything. She just tells him to get out of the city, and hopes that he and his wife don't fall to the virus, anyway.

He asks if they should be worried. She can't tell him that they should be terrified, but he hears it in her stuttering silence.

"Eric's at Georgetown," he says. "He's going to take the bar in a month."

"Oh," she replies. The last time she saw Eric, he stood on tiptoes for a hug.

"It might be nice for him to see you, again," Charlie prods, as if there's still time to mend fences.

She pretends there is, as well.

"Yeah, I'd love to see him. We've a house, a few hours outside the city. It'll be a quiet place to study."

"Thanks, Dana," Charlie says. "It's nice to know he's got family watching out for him. I'll let him know you're coming for him."

"Sounds good," she agrees. "And Charlie? Be safe."

She swings by the campus late on a sunny day, the afternoon time stretched by the heat of summer. So far, Washington is untouched by any symptoms of disease, but epicentres have begun to blot the topography of the States like a pox.

Eric squints against the sun, as he sees her car approaching, and he waves.

"Hello, Auntie D!" He cries. He's tall, like his father, like her father, and with a wide smile that used to be hers, but which she hasn't seen anyone in her family sport for years. She doesn't want to take him home.

"Hi, Eric," she says. She presses her lips together, hoping that with enough force, they'll bend into a polite curve.

He throws a small duffle into the back seat, and himself into the front with equal enthusiasm. The shocks of the car brace themselves, and she feels the chassis dip with his weight.

"I didn't think you'd recognise me," he says, grinning at her.

"It's been a long time," she acknowledges. "But you look just like your dad."

"I look like a Weasley," he corrects.

She must have missed that phase.

He clicks the belt in place, and reaches over for an awkward hug, kissing her on one cheek. An arm wraps around her shoulders, like family. There's no hesitation in his touch, no apology in his voice, no disappointment in the tilt of his gaze. She leans into the embrace. There's no estrangement here, and she starts asking normal questions.

"How's your mom?"

"She's good. Stressed because Patrick's probably going to be deployed in the next month, or so, but nothing else is new."

"She still teaching?"

"Still teaching. Trying to convince Patty to make a go of it when his term's up."

"How long is that?"

"This is his last tour, but he won't do it. He hates kids, and loves the Navy."

"Sounds a bit like your grandfather," she says.

"That's what dad says."

The afternoon passes, and she's making the final right hand turn up the drive before Eric's narrative has a chance to lapse, or recycle. The gravel pops under the tires of her SUV, as Eric stretches under the sun guard to get a glimpse of the house.

"Is this all yours?" he wonders.

"From the house, all the way back to the free way."

"It's beautiful," he says. "This place is really cool."

Mulder had bought the house outright because it wasn't; because there was nothing cool, or remarkable about it. But the faded boards have become familiar, the shutters border on windows left open to the fresh, reassuring smell of warm grass, and she thinks that something important lives in the dust of that house. It's nice to have that confirmed.

She turns the key.

"Got your stuff?"

It's dark inside. Boxes that weren't here when she left are piled against the walls, and windows. The kitchen table is buried under reams of paper, some of it still connected by shallow perforations, untouched by the passage of years. Eric probably wouldn't know the function of this design.

She drops her bag and keys on a small square of open space by the door, the little side table reserved for such purpose.

"You're in the spare room, up the stairs, and down the hall. Second door to your left," she states. "Mulder should have left you sheets -" But then, reconsidering, she says, "If not, there should be some in the linen closet in the bathroom."

It's strange, giving orders in a house that feels like home, but isn't. There are more pressing worries than laundry whites, though, and the quotidian aspect of Eric is dissolved the instant Einstein appears.

"Agent Scully!"

She races down the flight of stairs, a file open, pages loose in her hand.

"Assistant Director Skinner dropped these off. He said to tell you he was on his way out of town, like you asked, and that he hoped these help."

"Hope what help?" Eric asks.

Scully sighs, dropping her keys and purse by the door. There's still a small clearing cut from the forest of debris on the side table for her.

"It's everything that's left," she says.

Einstein speaks into the void of her non-answer, thrusting a small, pointed hand at Eric.

"Hello," she says, palm up. "I'm Karen."

"Eric. I'm Dana's nephew."

"Good to meet you."

Scully is convinced that it's business with everyone Einstein speaks to, that the formal outline of freshman college essays overlays all her exchanges, now.

"Did Skinner say where we was heading?"

Einstein shakes her head.

"Not to me," she replies. "Agent Mulder went with him, though."

"What?"

She snaps her head around, her fixed gazed, and pursed lips still commanding the absolute attention of her inferiors. So much so, that Einstein, desperate to muster such authority herself, stutters to reply.

"Yes," she says. "They left about three hours ago. I thought he told you. He said not to worry -"

"He always says that."

She can feel her heart accelerate, and thinks of boxcars, and trains, and fire, though they're well past such things now. Einstein scrambles to find some sort of solace.

"He said he'd be right back. They've probably just run for supplies. You know he wanted -"

"They took Skinner's truck?"

Now, Einstein hesitates.

"Yes."

"Stupid," Scully spits.

Eric stands motionless on the stairs, bag in hand, and confusion clear writ on his face.

"Aunt Dana, you good?"

She comes back to herself, as Einstein stares. Eric has no idea, she realises, and she turns to Scully. This outsider, her eyes accuse, this outsider intruding on their work. There's that disdain which Scully knows well. The X-Files breeds it in you, without warning. And there's the edge of paranoia. If you're not with us, you're against us. There's no room for ignorance or naivety. She knows that deeply. Without comprehension, without well-earned fear, you're a liability. And he is, Scully knows. Eric is a huge liability.

But he's also so domestic. Not the threatening, narrow-minded domesticity that trapped Teena Mulder in silence, that keeps mothers from vaccinating their children, and neighbours from trusting their neighbours. Eric's just the innocent product of privilege. He's a loving family, with expectations, and money enough to boost up student loans. He's a scholarship in his second year of university, and a transit pass, an exam next week, and three term-papers due. He's a man-sized cut out of the impossible. She dreams about that, and even though this Paphos isn't hers, he's hers to protect.

So she lies.


End file.
